Propelled By Passion

Carmen Boudier No Kinder, Gentler Union Leader

February 05, 2006|By STEPHANIE REITZ; Courant Staff Writer

Firebrand labor organizer Jerry Brown still remembers the afternoon in June 1969 when he met Carmen Boudier.

Brown was trying to organize workers at St. Mary's Home in West Hartford when Boudier, then 25 years old and a recent immigrant, approached him as he handed out union leaflets near the facility. Despite being tired from her $1.25-an-hour shift as a nurse's aide, she joined the fight on the spot, impressing Brown with her fervor and certainty.

``She was involved and active from the very first day we started to organize there,'' recalled Brown, who led the New England Health Care Employees Union, District 1199 for 26 years. ``The union was a vehicle for her to stand up and demand respect for herself and her fellow employees, and I think that's why she has always been so passionate about it.''

That passion has propelled Boudier, now 61, to the top of her union's hierarchy.

Boudier, of Bloomfield, ascended to the top spot at District 1199 when Brown, her longtime friend and mentor, stepped down in November as president of the controversial labor group. She now leads almost 22,000 health care workers at nursing homes, state facilities and other locations in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Brown was well known within his union and in Connecticut political circles, where he was loved and hated in equal measure.

Boudier, though also well-known among the union's members, is a mystery so far to many of the legislators and health care administrators who will soon encounter her at their meetings -- and, perhaps, leading protests and pickets at their offices.

Those who expect a kinder, gentler District 1199 under Boudier's leadership will be disappointed.

``It would be a shame and very disappointing, considering all of our years of work, if a new president comes along and the commitments seem to change. I can promise you that will not be the case here,'' Boudier said on a recent morning in her Hartford office.

Supporters say Boudier has always had a self-possessed air, even when she came to the United States from Jamaica for a job as a domestic worker for a West Hartford family. She went to work at St. Mary's Home two years later, and had been on the job for only a few weeks when she encountered Brown and joined the drive to unionize the workers.

Boudier remembers it as one of the most challenging fights of her life. By day, she helped care for the patients -- physically demanding work that required a lot of lifting, emotional fortitude and compassion for the frail men and women in her care.

After work, she often gathered with other organizers to talk strategy, plan the coming vote and try to keep spirits from flagging in the face of the very real possibility that they could lose their jobs.

``You were a dime a dozen,'' she said. ``Before the union, they could tell you, `If you don't like it, there's the door.'''

And because St. Mary's Home was run by nuns, the union drive had an especially difficult aspect. Boudier recalls that the nuns often invoked God and Jesus Christ, warning that unionizing would jeopardize the home's finances, and therefore hinder the caretaking mission -- a selfish action by the workers, at best, and pretty heavy sinning at worst.

At the same time, the facility's West Indian, Portuguese and African American workers were often led to believe that employees in each of the other ethnic groups were getting better treatment, Boudier said. That added to the challenge of trying to unite a tired, disparate group of people struggling to pay their bills and hoping not to lose their jobs.

Their determination, though, paid off. Later that year, they launched the third chapter of the small but aggressive District 1199 union, an early union-building victory that galvanized Boudier, who continued her union activism and moved two years later to a job as an emergency-room technician at Mount Sinai Hospital.

Boudier's professional growth coincided with the growth of District 1199, which had about 2,500 members when she left Mount Sinai to join the union's staff in 1973.

About 7,200 public employees joined during a sweeping unionization of state health care workers in 1979, and the addition of workers in many private nursing facilities since then has swelled the membership to almost 22,000.

As the union grew in numbers, it also grew in influence and created controversy as its leaders aggressively helped workers organize at facilities throughout the region, often picketing and occasionally walking out on strike.

One such strike was particularly bitter: Thousands of union workers at 39 nursing homes walked off the job in May 2001 over contract disputes, some returning to their jobs after two weeks and others staying on the picket lines for months.

Gov. John G. Rowland used state money to pay replacement workers, a move that a federal judge later deemed inappropriate.